Dodging bullets?

[chrisbishop]

I already wrote something to that effect in my last completed fanfic (last chapter of 'The Quest', soon to be posted - shameless advertising here...) but didn't go into any details about it. But what do you think happen to a bullet - or any other foreign body in Captain Scarlet - once his retrometabolism kicks in and he starts healing? Does is disappear? Or does something else happen? Or will it stay there until it is removed? My point of view may very well be different from yours, and I'd like to know what you think!

[Marion]

Oh Chris, here is a question and no mistake!
I was never very clear about it myself - although in the 1990's I read a comic story about a mission which started with Doctor Fawn handing Scarlet an aspirin and saying something like - you got shot in the head, this aspirin will help... (that's a paraphrase )
However, it seemed rather unlikely that the bullet would be absorbed into the body, so in one of my own stories I have Blue refer (rather facetiously) to Fawn's 'collection of bullets' removed from Scarlet's body.
In the X-Men 2 film (I think) you saw Wolverine recover from a gunshot wound by having the wound heal, and in so doing , push the bullet from the flesh - which was kinda neat and would still allow Fawn to keep a collection - so with a burst of plagarism - I think I would go for the eviction of foreign bodies by the healing process option....

[zero-x]

There was a comic strip and it had Fawn talking to Scarlet and said something like "your body seems to have dissolved the bullet..."

I thought that was a kind of laim excuse, and always thought it would be more realistic to have Fawn having to extract the invading body surgically.

[Mary]

I never gave the theory of foreign objects dissolving much thought, but did assume that Fawn would surgically remove them and/or stabilize Scarlet when possible, a) to speed up the recovery process and b) to give himself SOMEthing to do besides wringing his hands waiting for Scarlet to heal himself.

[Marion]

Actually, that is a good point, Mary, otherwise why does Scarlet need to go back to sick-bay? They could just prop him up in a corner and let him get on with it...
I prefer to think that - however the bullets are removed from his body - they have to be removed, they do not dissolve. There might be instances where he has recovered from a wound before Fawn gets to him (or he gets to Fawn) and then they presumably have the problem of how to sedate him whilst Fawn removes the offending bullet.... Maybe they have to shoot him again so he goes under and then dig both bullets out?
Not a nice thought....

[chrisbishop]

'Dissolving' may NOT be the right word for it, actually... Bullets - or any other form of foreign bodies - are matter after all. Like flesh, bones and blood, and the air and ground surrounding us, as a matter of fact. Maybe retrometabolism might transform the said foreign body into its simplest components and use it for repairing the damage body? I kind of remember one of our resident Docs mentioning that already - perhaps in our defunct first forum.

Okay, that might sound like a more complicating way to describe 'dissolving' but we might consider the possibility. I mentioned 'ground' earlier. We all know that if a simple grain of dirt get stuck in a wound, it could have serious consequences. Yet, with Scarlet we must assume that it won't be the case. His wound won't get infected or poisoned. What happen to that grain of dirt then? And are we to assume that the same will happen to the bullet?

Removing it would certainly quicken Scarlet's healing capacities, that's something we seem to agree on. And I'm sure Scarlet would feel more comfortable if it's gone from his head (to take Marion's earlier example). And I'm sure he's all for a three to four hours healing instead of six or seven...

[Doc Denim]

Hello all - have been trying to get back to this one for a while now....

Some good points, as always - especially about always having to rush Scarlet back to Sickbay. But that, I think, has more to do with Spectrum et al, just Not Knowing what Scarlet's retrometabolism really Is and how the hell it might Work.

It may well be that they could just "prop Scarlet up" and let the retrometabolism do it's thing (I happen to think so, but won't go into that entire storyagain) but no one wants to experiment with that - Spectrum (Fawn in particular) treats Scarlet's injuries as if he's still alive and in critical condition - meaning, if he's a got a bullet in him, take the damn thing out PDQ because how can the poor beggar even begin to heal if it's still in the way? No one knows if there's a time limit - if the bullet is still there in six hours will the retrometabolism expire? (I believe 6 hours of recovery is 'standard' and accepted - seem to recall that number being important.) Perhaps there's a limit on the number of times that Scarlet can 'recover' - nine lives, perhaps - I've never actually counted how many times he 'died' throughout the series - but I'd call it a concern, no matter who I was in Spectrum that knows about Scarlet's special abilities. In short - they just don't know what the retrometabolism's 'thresholds' are and no one wants to 'experiment' with it to find out where the limits might be. It would be ethically and morally wrong to 'play' with Scarlet's 'lives' like that.

But to answer the actual question - what 'happens' to the bullet itself (assuming Fawn doesn't get there in time to remove it first, there can still be a collection of 'em) my (unpopular, I know) take on this is that the Mysterons simply make it go away - because when they restore Scarlet, they're reconstructing him from their original blueprint (likely at the subatomic level, where Fawn simply can't see it happening - Scarlet 'pops' back into function a few molecules at a time) and updating his mind from their latest Scarlet-downloads on file. (It's the whole point of the 24/7 data flow back to Mars.) So, yes, I'd have to say that they dematerialize the bullet, or knife, or bit of dirt - whatever it was that Wasn't there when the original blueprint was made.

Just to be clear, let me differentiate: Healing vs. Restoration

What I believe happens to Scarlet Isn't an enhanced natural internal ability for his body to 'heal' itself - because if that was so, I'd think he'd have to be a mass of scar tissue by now - because scar tissue is what the body naturally provides for itself if it's been sufficiently damaged - and I think it's fair to say that Scarlet has been damaged that badly on occasion. And the body has problems filling in bits of missing matter, in the event that some bit happens to get lopped off - the replacement 'mass' (no matter how little we're talking about) has to come from somewhere, and if he's dead, he's not eating/drinking /breathing in anything to replace it. (I especially wonder about blood loss - and how that missing 'volume' is replaced without any 'input.)

If, however, Scarlet's 'recovery' is a matter of 'restoration' then the process is 'external' - maintained from without - the missing bits are replaced by the Mysterons, according to template, via the proposed interdimensional conduit, made from the same 'stuff' as the original Scarlet Construct in the opening episode - which, because the construct is an exact duplicate, is indistinguishable from anything the very first earth-born Scarlet had when he died the first time- so the process looks like 'healing' but isn't really. And for me, the very best thing about such a process is that it can save Scarlet from any fate whatsoever....even if he is incinerated, dismembered or eaten alive, just to mention a few of the previous grisly scenarios we've discussed before.....

Enough for now, I'm sure.....

Ciao!

Doc Denim

[chrisbishop]

If his 'healing capacity' - or whatever you call it - takes on surrounding matter - maybe the foreign objects themselves, or even simply air, which is also matter anyway - to replace lost blood, or missing tissus, then I don't see any reason for his body to retain any kind of scar.

[Marion]

On the subject of what fuels Scarlet's healing - Chris Drake's book - Captain Scarlet & the Mysterons - suggests that Scarlet is 'like a walking solar battery... constantly recharging himself from the sun's rays, ready for his dual with death. It suggests that is why Scarlet only needs 'a little sleep'.
It also suggests that his sixth sense is to do with picking up radiaton from other mysterons - but that it sounds like a telephone getting through to a fax machine. No wonder he goes all woozy when it happens... poor chap...

[FlicCity]

I rather think that what would happen to the bullet depends on where it is and how long it stays there. If it's near to the skin, then it probably gets 'pushed out' easily, but if it lodges deeper -- say, in the stomach -- and it isn't removed in a certain amount of time, I think that the retro-metabolism would probably be forced to break it down so that the 'repairs' could be finished. It would then be expelled from the body in whatever manner was easiest... (Poor Paul, imagine waking up because you need to throw up the remains of the bullet you were shot with!)
As for where the 'new' flesh/blood/whatever comes from... I never thought about that.
I've mentioned elsewhere that I think the crystals are physical storage for the Mysterons' energy requirements; I think that they give off this energy (think in terms of radiation) and that's what powers the retro-metabolism. No explanation of how the energy becomes flesh and blood (I don't think that came out right...) but then, the whole point is that no one understands retro-metabolism.

[Captain Indigo]

I always took bullets, other foreign bodies and small organisms to be dealt with rather like the way a human would. When a foreign body enters the human body, the immune system reacts by forming a membrane around the object and attempting to break the object down into it's component parts. This is what I always assumed would be the case with Retrometabolism too, although it couldn't hurt to remove the offending articles, which would certainally conserve energy during the healing process.

[mb2000]

So how did Scarlet survive the machine gun attack in the opening credits?

[chrisbishop]

I'll be taking a wild guess, here.

He walked out the alley, dropped dead for a few minutes, was collected by Spectrum and brought back to Cloudbase where he has been taken care of, until he revives again.

I think that covers much of the ground of what we already discussed above.

And after all, the opening sequence is but a dramatisation to illustrate that the hero of the series is indestructible. Not much more than that.

[Captain Indigo]

I would suggest that you read Marion Woods' 'The Passengers' for this, which gives a wonderful premise for the opening titles.

[shaqui]

Taking 'retrometabolism' (a phrase, one supposes, coined by Dr Fawn/Gold, and not used by the Mysterons) back to its original description of 'reversing matter', this almost implies taking an object back through its own timeline to the point where it was not destroyed. 'Retrometabolism' would only apply to a living organism, but one has to presume the process is identical whatever the object.

The question is - is Scarlet now caught in a kind of 'temporal loop'? Well, obviously not with regard to thought and memory, otherwise each time he is killed, he would not recollect any event after his initial revival after 'The Mysterons'. Is his body? Well, we see facial shadow, so he still ages, or at least, has a progressive metabolism or timeline.

Now we get into the deeper thoughts about what exactly is time? Is it a medium (that is, does time allow progress), or an effect (things progress or decay, and time is simply an offshoot of these)? Assuming the former, time - and therefore matter - could be reversed. However, the reversal of time must also be a displacement in space. The universe is constantly in motion/expansion, so any object 'reversed' would appear 'somewhere else' but for the sake of usage, the Mysterons presumably rematerialise it to where it would be of use - somewhere on Earth, and close to the point of the original's destruction. I suppose this could be considered a similar concept to Doc Denim's 'interdimensional conduit', although I don't believe Scarlet is always connected to a 'template' in this way.

How did the Mysterons reconstruct their city? We see what appears to be a device, which beams an energy at the points where buildings were - and they rematerialise. This implies a mechanism which produces this effect, placed outside the complex to prevent being destroyed itself. (Of course, one has to wonder if Spectrum were aware of this, and could have just destroyed the whole area - but who is to say the Mysterons did not have other devices, perhaps even in orbit, to make sure of their survival). Of course, this implies the Mysteron city is a physical construct. 'War To The Infinite' implies that the Mysterons may not even have a physical existence, and the complex is simply a means to communicate with our reality. Of course, this is fan speculation as well...

Going back to 'mechanics' and 'physics', how could retrometabolism work if 'reversing matter' is the main process? Scarlet isn't duplicated each time he is killed, otherwise the fact there are an increasing number of his corpses would presumably get a mention. His wounds heal, and he comes back to life in the same 'body'. This implies in someway, the reversing of time (and metabolism) remains within himself. He reverts to as he was before injury or death - smaller jumps back in time (these appear to vary from a mere hour to a whole day). There is no 'mechanism' - this appears to be, now, Scarlet's own will to survive, to live. The trigger.

We know little, if anything, about the Mysterons - it's been speculated what Earth fights is their computers, the original aliens having abandoned Mars in the distant past, programmed to retaliate against any hostile force. Maybe Scarlet's own 'programme', his genetics, have now taken over from the Mysteron one while under their control. Scarlet was one of the first 'reconstructions', and the Mysterons (or their computers), unfamiliar with the human strength of will, and evolutionary drives, underestimated what might happen when death occurred, and their control was no longer necessary. They certainly did not allow it to happen again...